What is Storytelling?
Storytelling uses words to create new worlds and experiences in a reader or listener's imagination. Storytelling can impact human emotions. It can also lead people to accept original ideas or encourage them to take action.
Storytelling can take many forms and structures. It can be a challenge to create a good story. I will help you every week with another Notion doc to improve your storytelling.
Storytelling is a powerful tool that great leaders use to motivate the masses and masterful writers harness to create classic literature. If you’re just getting started writing and telling stories, here are some storytelling tips that can help you strengthen your narratives and engage your audience:
A great story usually progresses towards a central moral or message.
When crafting a story, you should have a definite idea of what you’re building toward.
If your story has a strong moral component, you’ll want to guide listeners or readers to that message.
If you’re telling a funny story, you might build toward a twist that will leave your audience in stitches.
If you’re telling an engaging story, try to increase the dramatic tension and suspense right up until the climax of your narrative.
Great storytellers craft narratives that have all sorts of obstacles and hardships strewn in the path of their protagonists.
In order to be satisfied with a happy ending, audiences have to watch the main characters struggle to achieve their goals.
Compelling plots are built on conflict, and it’s imperative that you embrace conflict and drama in order to become a better storyteller.
Start from the closest point possible to serve your core message of the story. You want to hook the attention of your reader. Do this while jumping right into the action.
The reader don’t need to know what you have eaten to breakfast when you tell him the story of your fight with your best friend last night.
Spark curiousity from the beginning.
❌ A —> B —> Z
✅ A —> Z
There are many different ways to structure a story, but the three ingredients a story must have are a beginning, middle, and end.
A successful story will start with an inciting incident, lead into rising action, build to a climax and ultimately settle into a satisfying resolution.
We will go deeper into frameworks and structures in the next parts.